Wake up and start marketing!
You know those mornings, the alarm is going off but you don’t want to wake up. You’re half asleep and have not made the commitment to fully wake up. With small businesses, where you are trying to do everything yourself, often times this is what happens with your small business marketing plan. Your program is half asleep and it doesn’t want to get into gear.
But you need to remember…..Your marketing program will only work when you are fully committed, fully awake and ready to make it work.
Here are 5 steps to help you focus, wake up your program and make following your marketing plan easier:
1. Make sure you have a written marketing plan. You absolutely must have one in place. The more detailed and specific the better, but the bottom line is just get something on paper. Have clear goals (they can be simple) and a clear plan of action regarding how to attain your goals. Includesocial media, customer word of mouth and traditional media.
2. Collaborate – use your co-workers, form a committee and/or use your friendsto help you put your plan together. Bounce around ideas and have as many eyeballs as possible look at the marketing plan. When people are part of the plan, they have a vested interest in it and want to be part of making it work. Also, some may step up to use their talents to help you out.
3. Focus on enacting your plan. How many times have you participated in a retreat or a planning session where taped flip chart sheets are all over the wall spewing a myriad of ideas that have been brainstormed? What generally happens next… once the meeting is over… the great ideas are filed away never to be revisited. To combat this type of behavior set aside time each week to check off or give a status report on your marketing actions. You must be acutely aware of and be accountable to your marketing plan or it will never work.
4. Don’t roll over and go back to sleep! When you are trying to run all aspects of your business it’s easy to want to turn your back on certain portions of it. You simply get overwhelmed. To combat this, as far as marketing is concerned, make a list of simple actions steps to work through. Bite things off in small pieces. As complex as setting up a social media program or as simple as getting a flyer done – just make it easy on yourself. You’re probably thinking that sure, it’s easy to write about this, but really, this is how I personally handle my marketing efforts. An action list helps me each and every day.
5. Hit the ground running. Marketing drives your small business – so be wide awake when working on your marketing plan. Each day when you get up and going in the morning you are committing yourself to another day. Be committed to your marketing program. Believe that you can do it. The mental aspect is a big part of making things happen.
Small business marketing can be fun and very challenging. There will be days that you feel like you are in that early morning state of being half awake. But if you are fully dedicated to your marketing program and follow these steps, you will be wide awake in no time and ready to take advantage of the wide variety of marketing options available to you.
Looking for more small business marketing tips? I post a few tips each week (generally 1 per work day) on the Just a Small Town Girl Facebook page – I hope to see you there too! And please feel free to download my new ebook The Small Town Marketing Handbook which brings marketing to a much more personal level!!
Great article Leslie. Writing down your plan and clear daily or weekly goals are so important so it's great that you listed this as the first step. Keep up the good work!
Thank you so much for visiting the blog and commenting! I appreciate you taking time to write!!
I completely agree with your suggestions of planning, collaboration and follow up. I think too many people jump in to social media without a clear plan for why they're doing it and end up spinning their wheels and wondering why nothing is happening.
I read the article about how you used social media to promote tourism in Lake Arrowhead. When a small business is creating a plan, how much leeway can they leave for experimentation to see what works? It seems you did a lot of learning by experimenting with social media on your Lake Arrowhead tourism project and it really paid off. Should a good plan assume trial and error, but stick to an overall goal of tools and time commitment?
Thanks for the great insights. (And the Beatles break-up analogy was superb, too!)
What great questions! The social media part of the Lake Arrowhead tourism marketing plan left plenty of room for trial and error. That was OK in my mind because it was only costing my time. No hard dollars were expended. But I never deviated from our overall marketing goals, our mission statement, and our message.
Over the years we have “experimented” with all different sorts of advertising/marketing mediums with varying degrees of success. We operate exactly as any small business should (but often times doesn't) – we track everything that we do and figure out the ROI so we know how well our marketing has paid off. What's interesting about the social media project is that we didn't really have anyone we could talk to to see what they thought about diving into social media. With other marketing projects we have always been able to see circulation numbers, know the reach of a particular advertising medium and what not so I always knew kind of what to expect. This was completely different. However, I was confident in our “product” so I hoped that it would translate well to social media… but it was truly a leap of faith.
In hindsight I can now say that it was a great leap of faith and I encourage everyone to try it. Just be aware of the time commitment and stay true to your marketing goals and objectives. As long as you do that (at least in my mind) it is fine to have some room for experimentation and if you are only spending your time and not your money you don't have a whole lot to lose and quite possibly a whole lot to gain.
Thanks again for your comments and questions!!
What great questions! The social media part of the Lake Arrowhead tourism marketing plan left plenty of room for trial and error. That was OK in my mind because it was only costing my time. No hard dollars were expended. But I never deviated from our overall marketing goals, our mission statement, and our message.
Over the years we have “experimented” with all different sorts of advertising/marketing mediums with varying degrees of success. We operate exactly as any small business should (but often times doesn't) – we track everything that we do and figure out the ROI so we know how well our marketing has paid off. What's interesting about the social media project is that we didn't really have anyone we could talk to to see what they thought about diving into social media. With other marketing projects we have always been able to see circulation numbers, know the reach of a particular advertising medium and what not so I always knew kind of what to expect. This was completely different. However, I was confident in our “product” so I hoped that it would translate well to social media… but it was truly a leap of faith.
In hindsight I can now say that it was a great leap of faith and I encourage everyone to try it. Just be aware of the time commitment and stay true to your marketing goals and objectives. As long as you do that (at least in my mind) it is fine to have some room for experimentation and if you are only spending your time and not your money you don't have a whole lot to lose and quite possibly a whole lot to gain.
Thanks again for your comments and questions!!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and answering my question, Leslie. You have provided me with some great ideas to think about.
A big thank you for taking the time to comment Slade!!